Pages

Friday, April 30, 2010

Here's a good one. This is a perfect example of what many creationist types do when confronted with data that contradicts their beliefs, they resort to making shit up. Fundies have a special talent, an ability to melt your brain with their monotonous array of inanity. I think I should point out if any fundie stumbles across this, that both the Flood story and the Tower of Babel are considered by intelligent theologians as being mythical stories. The point behind their conception by the authors of the Old Testament was to convey the message behind it, not to tell a literal account of true events.

[In answer to a question as to why there are no water stains in cave walls if there was a global flood]

It's likely the sea stains were erased just after the Tower of Babel. Sea stains are a form of language and it would have been confounded like everything else.

how are they considered language? well they convey meaning and anything (that is everything) conveys meaning in the universe. So it really does not matter if you do the research or not, if sea stains aren't found it's due to CONFOUNDATION not because they were never there.

It only took one day before someone involved in the recent "ark" find exposed it as a fraud! Why am I not surprised at all? It couldn't possibly be because fundies have this strange tendency to lie and make shit up to try and prove their point could it? Anyway, I woke up this morning to find a blog post from P.Z. Myers at Pharyngula exposing this fraud. Apparently an American Fundie involved in the expedition got ripped of by the Chinese members of the crew, so he sent an email out explaining how they took some wood from another old site near the Black Sea and took it up into a cave on Mount Ararat. He also mentioned that some of the photos were in fact taken at the Black Sea site, not on Ararat at all.
All I can say is, I wouldn't expect anything less from compulsive liars like Young Earth Creationists.

Wednesday, April 28, 2010

An article from Yahoo News yesterday has a "group of Chinese and Turkish evangelical explorers" claiming they found Noah's Ark up on Mount Ararat. There are several things wrong with this story, so I'll just go ahead and point everything out that I can think of.

1) The story is mythological, not literal.
2) The story was not original, but was rather copied from surrounding cultures, notably the Epic of Gilgamesh from the Babylonians.
3) The group of people who discovered it, are bible-bashers on a mission to prove their faith, they aren't archaeologists, they aren't scientists at all, they aren't historians, they aren't scholars of any sort. The article specifically states that they are evangelical explorers, so who gives a damn about a piece of wood they found on a mountain??
4) This is not the first attempt that Fundies have made to try and prove the Biblical Flood story.
5) There is no geological evidence to support a region-wide flood up to 3000m and most certainly no evidence to support a worldwide flood

That's all I can think of that frustrates the hell out of me right now about this article. If anyone else can think of any other problems with this 'find' let me know and I'll tag them on the end with your name by it.

ThatAtheistChick: These bible-thumpers supposedly carbon dated the wood to say that it was from Noah's non-existent flood, too. Again, they're not scientists, so how exactly did they "carbon date" this wood? If no archaeologists or historians studied this and confirmed this, then obviously it's a hoax.

Tuesday, April 27, 2010

I was browsing YouTube and I came across this video, parodying the Mac vs. PC ads, but instead it was Creationism vs. Evolution. I just have to ask a question (somewhat rhetorical, but if you have an answer go ahead), is un-laugh a word? because The video that linked me to this one made me laugh, it was a parody of Christian vs. Atheist, and as soon as I clicked onto this video and heard the words come out of their mouths, I instantaneously lost all sense of humour, and a blank stare was plastered on my face, and my jaw nearly hit the desk.

Well, here's the video if you want to numb your brain with Creationism babble.

I remember a very distinct episode from my childhood where I was told by someone else about asking God/Jesus to come into your life. I was about 2 or 3 years old, and the whole idea didn't really make any sense, but it was an older kid that was telling me so I just took their word for it. If other people are anything like myself, they would have had a similar experience at a young age of someone else telling them about god, and just accepting it as true, because children are simply gullible and naive. Up until that point I was by definition an atheist. I had no conception of gods or religions. Sure, I had been taken along to church from a very young age, but that is one of the earliest memories I have, I can't really remember anything else prior to that, so if that event had never happened, and if no one else for the rest of my life had ever mentioned gods, religions, spirits, demons, souls, supernatural occurrences and the likes, and if I'd never come across any material vaguely related to them (yes I know it's implausible, just stick with me) then I would still be an atheist today.

So, my whole point is that everyone is essentially born an atheist, even those born into Christian families as I was.

Too often the reformation is depicted by protestants as some sort of moral victory for 'True Christianity' and that the reformers, most notably John Calvin and Martin Luther were heroes campaigning against the evil Catholic Church, but this simply isn't the case. Now I'm not siding with the Catholic Church here, as you should gather from Part 1 I don't think very highly of their antics either.

John Calvin (1509-1564), and Martin Luther (1483-1546) are held up as 'saints' in a way by many Protestants, and films like Luther just contribute to this image.

Lets take Martin Luther first since he came earlier.

In his later life, Luther was incredibly anti-Semitic and wrote a book by the name of 'Von den Jüden und iren Lügen' which translates to 'On the Jews and Their Lies'. He obviously spent a lot of time thinking about the Jews, and formulated a plan to get rid of them. Here is the plan.

"First to set fire to their synagogues or schools and to bury and cover with dirt whatever will not burn, so that no man will ever again see a stone or cinder of them. ..."

"Second, I advise that their houses also be razed and destroyed. ..."

"Third, I advise that all their prayer books and Talmudic writings, in which such idolatry, lies, cursing and blasphemy are taught, be taken from them. ..."

"Fourth, I advise that their rabbis be forbidden to teach henceforth on pain of loss of life and limb. ..."

"Fifth, I advise that safe-conduct on the highways be abolished completely for the Jews. ..."

"Sixth, I advise that usury be prohibited to them, and that all cash and treasure of silver and gold be taken from them. ... Such money should now be used in ... the following [way]... Whenever a Jew is sincerely converted, he should be handed [a certain amount]..."

"Seventh, I commend putting a flail, an ax, a hoe, a spade, a distaff, or a spindle into the hands of young, strong Jews and Jewesses and letting them earn their bread in the sweat of their brow... For it is not fitting that they should let us accursed Goyim toil in the sweat of our faces while they, the holy people, idle away their time behind the stove, feasting and farting, and on top of all, boasting blasphemously of their lordship over the Christians by means of our sweat. No, one should toss out these lazy rogues by the seat of their pants."

"If we wish to wash our hands of the Jews' blasphemy and not share in their guilt, we have to part company with them. They must be driven from our country" and "we must drive them out like mad dogs."

Martin Luther's Anti-Semitism had a long-lasting impact on German religious and cultural views, and was a major influence on Hitler's Third Reich. Hitler himself though thought Luther was too soft on the Jews.
There isn't much else I can say about Luther, as his owns words speak for themselves, he was by no means the saint as portrayed in the film about him. I'm not really sure whether Luther directly committed any crimes against the Jews, but no doubt as a result of his writings, many people lost their lives.

John Calvin on the other hand while substantially less hateful towards the Semitic people still expressed some distaste towards them, as did most clergy in his day, saying things like:

"I have had much conversation with many Jews: I have never seen either a drop of piety or a grain of truth or ingenuousness—nay, I have never found common sense in any Jew."

Where I find utter disgust with John Calvin lies in his totalitarian religious practices. Calvin was a very strong advocate of silencing anyone who had a dissenting view and by silence I mean murdering them. Calvin was personally responsible for burning Michael Servetus as the stake, who up until then was a close associate and friend of Calvin. Servetus was one of the great minds of his day, in fact he was the first European to accurately describe how Pulmonary circulation worked. What was he killed for? Heresy. Servetus was dobbed in to the Geneva Council for heresy by someone whom he considered to be a friend. He was killed for not believing in the Trinity.
Any moderate Christian who looks up to John Calvin as some kind of sophisticated Theologian or a hero of the reformation is thoroughly misguided. John Calvin is no better than Osama bin Laden.

Because a beast has four legs and one gender[, i]f you put two men together, they have four legs and two penises, still one gender, that’s a form of bestiality. If you put Eve and Eve together, two vaginas, that’s still one gender, that’s a form of bestiality.

[...]

Everybody should have human rights. But you have to be human. Human means you deal with the opposite sex... We as a city, D.C., we’ve got to realize that you’ve got to discriminate against something that’s inhuman.

Wednesday, April 21, 2010

These days, you almost can't go a day without hearing about the child abuse scandals within the Catholic Church. In fact, the corruption goes all the way from the priests to the pope himself. No doubt there are many honest, decent clergymen within the church, it is to be noted that the corruption is all the way through the institution. For how long child abuse has been rampant within Catholicism is anyone's guess, but we do know that there virtually hasn't been a single period within the history of the church that hasn't been involved in some kind of appalling practice, and at some points in history they have been involved in several at once.

Let's look at a brief history of the church.

The institution of the church wasn't set up until the beginning of the 4th century C.E. up until that point they had been the victims of some severe persecution from the Romans, under the reign of: Nero, Domitian, Trajan, Marcus Aurelius, Septimus Severus, Maximinus the Thracian, Decius, Valerian, Diocletian and Galerius. By the time Constantine made Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire, rifts had already developed within Christianity, rifts that would later be used by the Catholics as justification to persecute and kill Heretics.

The next 1200 years was a "Dark Age". Virtually all scientific, philosophical, cultural and political progress came to a grinding halt. All of the in-fighting within Christianity and Europe, The Crusades, and several Inquisitions all came under the jurisdiction of the Holy See and the Catholic Church. It is almost frivolous to try and list all the misconduct of the church and the iniquities they placed on others during this time, for they are just far to numerous.

The Reformation is another issue all together, and I'll deal with Luther and Calvin in another post.

I think the modern Catholic church could also be dealt with in a seperate post at a later date too.

I'm not joking, according to this article on digitaljournal.com the TSA (Transport Security Administration) had placed a 6 year old on their terrorist watchlist, making her unable to fly with her family to go on their holiday. The article only suggests that she was placed on the list because she didn't have a frequent flyer number (which seems a bit strange to require considering she is only 6).

Saturday, April 17, 2010

The pure blood lines of early man allowed for incest until the law of Moses was handed down by GOD....the blood lines aren't pure enought in this day and age for relatives to engage in Marriage. Adam and Eve sons and daughter married each other to keep the earth populated with mankind.

For some reason, I felt compelled to watch a debate between Michael Shermer and Kent Hovind that showed up on my Youtube recommendations list the other day. Listening to Hovind's 'arguments' often made me cover my face with my palms in despair of his deceit. So I thought I'd go through some creationist literature and see what they have to say about vestigial organs, as Kent very obviously had no idea what a vestige was.

Although at one time there were dozens of features of the human body listed as vestigial, most have been shown to have important functions. After all, even if a few parts have lost their original function that does not prove evolution. To demonstrate evolution, you need to show the development of completely new structures, not the loss and degeneration of previous characteristics.

In one single paragraph the author shows that he has no idea whatsoever what a vestigial feature really is, and has a very flawed perception of how evolution works. As I explained in my last post about vestigiality, it is not something that has completely lost its function, but rather something that no longer performs its original function, and has adapted to performing something else. Evolution is a process of gradual, progressive change or development, not of spontaneous formation and vestigial structures are a great example of this.

Even if this organ turned out to be functionless, this would only demonstrate that the function was lost in the human lineage. It would not prove common ancestry between man and animals.

Here they are blatantly lying to themselves. If a structure appears in a human and also in a similar animal (e.g. another mammal), then it is assumed that they both received the structure from a common ancestor. This assumption is valid because this single structure is not the only piece of evidence linking the two animals.

This next quote just makes me feel sorry for them, it's from the same AiG article.

At best, evidence of vestigial organs in man demonstrates deterioration and loss of information since the Fall. They are evolutionary relics of common ancestors with animals only if you begin with evolutionary presuppositions.

If the fossil record validated the idea that humans have "devolved" from a better state, then creationists would be taken seriously, but it is demonstrably false from all the evidence of human ancestry that has been discovered.

It should be pretty obvious that the people involved in promoting creationism are either actively deceiving people for some reason unknown to me, or they are simply naive and ignorant.

Just yesterday, AiG published a short article about the fossil that I mentioned the media blew out of proportion, claiming that it was rewriting human evolution and so on. The main point of their article was to say that they were going to be writing an article about it. Ok.

Here's a little quote from their pre-article article that makes me extremely frustrated at the media.

That observation begs the question: why has so much been so wrong in the evolutionists’ recounting of their story of human evolution, and now it has to be redrawn? Will some science textbooks be seen as obsolete and have to be tossed?

Wow. Creationists are using media mis-information as ammunition against evolutionary theory now.

They also make a small criticism of palaeontologists by saying that they don't agree with each other over classifications.

Do some secular scientists already disagree about Sediba’s classification—whether this fossil really should be classified (like the famous “Lucy”) in the genus Australopithecus, or perhaps be better designated as Homo instead?

Contrary to what they may believe, genus classifications are rather arbitrary when it comes to defining the point at which an evolutionary line may cross over between genus'. As creationists like Kent Hovind frequently point out, every animal gives birth to its own 'kind'. This is possibly one of the only things that Kent says that is actually true. No animal gives birth to a different kind of animal, but as I've explained before in my misconceptions about evolution posts, species gradually change over time, and if you compare one individual with its parent and with its offspring, they are most certainly the same 'kind' but if you take specimens 1,000 generations either side, they will likely be considered a different 'kind'. So you should be able to see why it is a grey area when defining at what point an evolutionary line transitions from one genus into another, in this case it is from the Australopithecus genus to the Homo genus.

As creationists, we can be confident of one thing: the Creator God created humans distinct from all animals, and we were made in His image and not from an ape-like creature (Genesis 1). By the way, that truth will be presented in a striking new exhibit inside our Creation Museum to be unveiled in a few weeks.

It is obvious to me when AiG say things like this that they really aren't interested in real science. To them, the Bible is 100% true and nothing will ever change about that in their mind. This makes them rather intellectually dishonest, especially considering much of the Bible is demonstrably false already.

Wednesday, April 7, 2010

Once again, journalists demonstrate their lack of understanding of evolution by writing things like "Missing Link" every time a new fossil is found, I wrote a post about this last year when Ardi was discovered. The new fossil hominid discovered is an ancestor of Homo habilis, according to the article and is around 2.5 million years old, which would place this fossil on the border between the Australopithecus genus and the Homo genus. So while this is a fairly important stage in human evolution, it is by no means a "missing link". Palaeontologists have already discovered dozens and dozens of fossils from this time period, so in that respect it isn't even very notable. The only thing about this particular fossil that justifies writing a news article about is that it is possibly the most intact fossil of this kind ever found.

After establishing that it is by no means a missing link because we already knew it existed and that we already have numerous partial fossils of this same species........
and that the term missing link is deceptive........

If it is confirmed as a missing link between the two groups, it would be of immense scientific importance, helping to fill in a gap in the evolutionary history of modern man.

........

Fill a gap in the evolutionary history of modern man? Now that is just not true... Do these journalists not know when to shut up and just let the facts talk for themselves? Do they really have to pad out the article with ignorant statements like this one?

Anyway, Wikipedia has an excellent list of fossils related to human evolution, which I highly recommend anyone interested in the topic go and check out

Tuesday, April 6, 2010

Scientists recently discovered lumps of amber from the Cretaceous period in Africa. It doesn't stop there, they weren't just boring old (~95 million years old!) lumps of fossilised tree resin, they contained very well preserved insects. These insects were flying and crawling around when the dinosaurs were walking the earth, so in a sense it's like looking back in time. Some of them have been extinct for ages (literally), and others provide valuable insight into the ancestry of our modern insects. I would provide pictures of these, but I have a feeling the pictures are copyrighted by DiscoveryNews, so I'll post a link to their page instead.

Monday, April 5, 2010

The son of possibly the most homophobic man in all of western society, who left his fathers church decades ago has recently given an interview to a Canadian news magazine. If you're at all interested in a look into the twisted psyche of the Westboro Baptist Church, then I highly recommend that you watch the interview. It's 30 minutes long and Nate Phelps (Fred's son) talks about nearly everything about his life before abandoning his deranged family.

Sunday, April 4, 2010

I'm getting comment spammed by someone by the name of Dennis Markuze. He goes by several alias', and has many accounts that he uses to spam people.
These are some of the names he uses: Dennis Markuze, Dave Mabus, davabus, dathesm, davidmabus, davmab11, DM.
These are some of his email addresses: dmabus@mail.com, davidms@mail.com, dmab@lavabit.com.

This man is a bonafide psychopath, and has sent multiple death threats to PZ Myers, and has expressed his desire to kill all atheists. So until this dangerous, psychotic, pathetic, cancerous excuse for a human being stops spamming me, I'm putting on comment filters, so all comments will have to be approved by myself first. I wish google would put in a feature that allowed me to block individual users/IP addresses.

The imbeciles over at Creation Ministries International have managed to get one of their lackeys to conjure up a book responding to Richard Dawkins' "The Greatest Show on Earth : The Evidence for Evolution", and they've called it "The Greatest Hoax on Earth : Refuting Dawkins on Evolution". The introduction to the book is available at the link I provided. I read this introduction yesterday, and a large part of it is spent personally criticising Dawkins himself, so my hope for the rest of the book is very dim indeed. Most, if not all of the evidence Dawkins provided in TGSOE is undeniable and irrefutable so I'm not quite sure what Jonathan Sarfati could possibly say. The evidence covered in TGSOE includes evidence from selective breeding and domestication, fossils, embryology, geographic distribution, comparative anatomy and genetic evidence. Dawkins even covers some common misconceptions about evolution, spends some time expressing his discontent with creationists, and even explains in some detail how radiometric dating works, which is how we know the age of the earth. Jonathan Sarfati is a young earth creationist with a Ph.D in chemistry. So he's obviously very intelligent, but it is likely that his intelligence is very selective and he has never studied geology or biology, so why he is writing a book trying to refute a biologist in his own field of expertise is beyond me.

Saturday, April 3, 2010

The following fundie quote is potentially hazardous to your health, so please approach it with caution. It is a quote from the notoriously bigoted republican fundie who is known as Ann Coulter. This quote is from the year 2000, where it seems she proudly wore her dominionist beliefs.

The ethic of conservation is the explicit abnegation of man's dominion over the Earth. The lower species are here for our use. God said so: Go forth, be fruitful, multiply, and rape the planet -- it's yours. That's our job: drilling, mining and stripping. Sweaters are the anti-Biblical view. Big gas-guzzling cars with phones and CD players and wet bars -- that's the Biblical view. Producing oil isn't so bad for the environment anyway. During World War II, our boats were going at breakneck speed to get oil to England (what with the war and all). There were oil spills everywhere. Half the beaches in the United States were slathered in oil. Six weeks later all the birds were back.

Friday, April 2, 2010

I just stumbled across this excellent T-shirt store on wearscience.com, and it's called "Teach the Controversy". They have some excellent shirts such as suggesting we should teach the stork theory of where babies come from. The controversy over Alchemy, Reptillians, Alien pyramid origins, 2012 and many other Wacky ideas. If I had excess money I'd possibly consider buying one. I'll show you a few pics of the shirts.

Thursday, April 1, 2010

While some people around the world may be celebrating the death of Jesus this coming weekend, I certainly won't be. Easter is another example of a pagan festival that was hijacked by Christianity. The name Easter is derived from 'Ēostre' which is the Old English name for the Germanic goddess named 'Ôstarâ'. Ôstarâ was the goddess of fertility, so it comes as no surprise that our 'easter bunny' and easter eggs come from this originally pagan fertility festival. Though there is much debate amongst scholars as to whether Ôstarâ was originally a Germanic goddess or rather just a later invention, the origin of the 'eggs and bunnies' is most certainly linked to this goddess.